Ahg!!

So I had a very irritating phone call this week. I was sitting at someones desk fixing their computer, when the main phone rang at work. The receptionist was away from her desk so I decided to answer the phone. There was a man on the other end of the phone that asked about a particular sale of almonds we had done. He wanted to know if the almonds had been pasteurized. I remembered the sale, and told him that they had been pasteurized. Then all of a sudden this lady starts telling me off. She was really upset that the almonds they purchased had been pasteurized. She told me that it was ridiculous to pasteurize them because almonds don't have salmonella, they only get it through the mishandling of almonds. She said that salmonella came from livestock, not almond trees. She inferred the almonds would only be contaminated when they are processed and if we didn't have clean processing procedures.

I almost wanted to tell her that she didn't really know what she was talking about. Where does salmonella come from? It can come from birds, snakes, lizards, and other creatures. What do we have out in the almond orchards? Snakes, lizards, birds, coyotes, jack rabbits, gophers, squirrels, mice, rats, ect. True I haven't heard of cattle or sheep in our orchards, but I can't imagine that mice and rats are any better than cattle.

Then she had the nerve to tell me that she had looked up the "law" and knew that we could sell her under 100 lbs and it didn't have to be pasteurized. First, there is no "law" for almonds to be pasteurized. The almond industry has voluntarily implemented pasteurization requirements on all domestic loads. Second, only sales at farmer's markets and at roadside stands will be able to sell almonds that are unpasteurized and only up to 100 lbs to one consumer. Third, the sale that she was part of, he had purchased 2000 pounds. So he wouldn't have qualified for that exemption. Even if he did, we do not have a roadside stand, nor do we sell at a farmer's market and so we would not have sold him unpasteurized almonds.

Anyway, she was mad because she wanted sprout-able food and now she had 100 lbs that had been treated for salmonella. She didn't want that because she was trying to eat healthy and now our almonds have been chemically treated for salmonella. I wanted to tell her that our almonds aren't organic, and have been produced with the help of chemicals.

I did tell her that we don't sell retail, and this sale was done as a favor because he was one of our bee keepers, and we only do these sales for our contract laborers and other vendors.

When she hung up the phone, she was still frustrated with the situation, but she had calmed down a bit. Ahg!! What a way to start off a day.